Promisedlands.info was created during
an artists research residency at the International Institute
of Visual Arts [Iniva] in 2008-9. On this site
you will find one hundred pages of images,
music and texts exploring the theme of the promised land in historical
and contemporary accounts of migration.

With this website we offer a transformation
of the idea of the promised land from a geographical space of nation
and region, singularity and sovereignty,
into a multiplicity of zones, located
as much beneath as above the land, as present in the soul of the song
as in the will of the state, and whose identities
and locations shift and change over time.

We propose a creative rethinking of the idea of the promised land through
which the mythologies and histories,
tensions and contradictions, the terrors
and pleasures of the journey, the new knowledges born of exile, arrival
(or return), the imaginary, the material,
the sacred, the secular and the scientific
nature of the lands themselves, their past and possible futures, are
brought into play.

Promisedlands.info was the subject of
performance presentations at Iniva in October 2008 and the International
Symposium on Electronic Art [ISEA] in
August 2009.
Performance presentations
will take place at Iniva in Autumn 2009 and FACT/Tate Liverpool’s
Black Atlantic season in 2010. Please see the
news page for details.

We would like to thank Gary Stewart @
Iniva and Helen Sloan @ Scan for their support, and Trinli Gauder for
his technical assistance.